Prefs v Green Infrastructure ITs

[BusyBumbleBee]

As part of my investment strategy I have a part of all my investment portfolios which is solely invested for income.

A goodly part of that was usually invested in Preference shares but a fundamental part of the purchase decision was never to buy at or above par and only to buy those issued by large, 'sound' companies. Of course in the strange times we have seen since 2008 they have soared in price to what seemed to me to be unsustainably high prices - with a commensurate drop in running yield.

So I decided to sell them all in May 2015 and invest the proceeds in higher yielding Green Infrastructure shares such as BSIF, NESF, JLEN, TRIG and UKW all of which had a substantial part of their income from government backed RPI linked payments - and the rest was coming from a product - electricity - which every consumer had to buy. Since then I have had a steadily increasing income and an increase in capital value to boot. All have also seen an increase in NAV

With hind sight that was a wise decision as the whole Rrefs market has been seriously dented (30%(ish) fall in a couple of days) by the recent AVIVA announcement that they have found a way to buy them back at par despite them trading at a 60%(ish) premium to par: see HTTPS://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/busi ... -jgmtzxpl3

The income part of my portfolio has some Retail Bonds and some REITs as well and averages slightly over 6% on current values.